In my presentation I first talked about
Switzerland. It has a population of about eight million people with
24% people being foreigners and 35% having a migration background.
This, its position in Europe and its four official languages
contributes to the diversity of the country, which also makes it
attractive to refugees: Switzerland has a long history of people
seeking for protection in the country.
After I presented the history of refugees in
Switzerland since the Second World War I went on explaining the 1951
Refugee Convention which defines a refugee, sets out the rights
of individuals who are granted asylum and
the responsibilities of
nations that grant asylum.
A chart displayed the asylum applications from
January to October 2015 in Switzerland and showed that almost 30’000
people were seeking for asylum in this time. Most of the people are
coming from Eritrea, followed by Afghanistan and Syria.
Then I presented the procedure of applying for
asylum in Switzerland. Most of the people seeking for asylum get
rejected during this procedure. In 2013 only 30% of the refugees got
admitted. But with the refugee crisis in Europe the restrictions are
weakened so that more people from Syria or Eritrea can get accepted.
But there are also a lot of people who are worried
with the amount of people migrating to Switzerland, which is why
there is a strong support for the right winged party SVP. They worry
about their jobs, their wage level or the criminal rate even though
the statistics doesn’t support this assumption. For example, there
can’t be found a higher criminal rate for foreigners than for Swiss
people.
Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to
talk about this topic in class. It was very interesting!
Links:
•State Secretariat for Migration SEM, (November
2010). https://www.sem.admin.ch/sem/en/home.html
•Swiss Refugee Council, (November 2010).
https://www.refugeecouncil.ch/asylum-law/asylum-procedure.html
•The UN Refugge Agency, (November 2010).
http://www.unhcr.ch
•Swiss Federal Statistical Office, (November
2010). http://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/portal/en/index.html
•New Journal of Zurich, (November 2010).
http://www.nzz.ch
